It has always said, you’re as good as your last restore, not your last backup. How many of you make your backups and think that everything is OK. There comes a time that you have to restore your database from a backup and you find out that one or more backup files is corrupt.

Testing your backups is a tedious job and it takes a lot of time which I as a DBA don’t have. I don’t have the time to restore a database, run a DBCC command for every database that’s backed up.

There is a solution and it’s called “Test-DbaLastBackup” which is part of the dbatools module.

It goes through the following steps:

Restore the database with the name “dbatools-testrestore-[databasename]” by default. The prefix can be changed.

Run a DBCC check on the database

Remove the database

You’ll see a progress bar how far the database restore is.

After the restore the DBCC command is executed. You’ll not see any progress for that step.

When the entire process is complete the command will output the results:

But for me that’s not enough. This is one database and some of my servers have more than 20 databases on it with sizes ranging from 50 GB to 500 GB (not that large yet but large enough). I want to create a job that executes the test on all the databases and send the results to me.

It’s not going to be a SQL Server Agent job but a Windows Scheduled Task. I don’t need the SQL Server Agent for this and it makes more sense to do this outside of SQL Server.

To start testing I created a file called “backuptest.ps1” and put in the following code:

Make sure your task is set to run under an account that has privileges to access the SQL Server and write the file.

A couple of things that could be in this script:

Execute the script over multiple servers

Mail the results

Add checks and error catching to make sure everything runs

Unfortunately the command “Test-DbaLastBackup” doesn’t allow us to supply servers. I could copy the row that tests the backup but that’s not me. I want things to run in one go and repetitive things don’t work out for me.

I don’t want to log into my server and lookup the results. I want them in my e-mail box when I check my e-mail i the morning. For that you could use the Send-Message commandlet.

With the multiple servers, e-mail functionality and the checks the final code looks something like this: